I’m spending most of the year in Berlin at present, helping to look after my granddaughter. So which team to support? I’m in east Berlin, so I should support Union Berlin. They are the team of the east, as opposed to Hertha Berlin, the team of the west, who play in the Olympic Stadium that hosted Hitler’s 1936 games. Union, pretty new to the Bundesliga, are flying high, just three points behind the mighty Bayern, who have won the Bundesliga for the last nine years (yawn). But Union have a tiny ground, capacity not much over 20,000, and I have more chance of Elon Musk asking me to go to Mars than of getting a ticket.
I therefore looked out for smaller clubs, of which Berlin has several. Before Christmas, I went to see Dynamo Berlin, who play in one of the regional leagues, taking on Energie Cottbus. The football was a bit better than at Edgar Street, the crowd a bit larger, but I felt at home. It helped that a lot of the chants were easy to understand, despite the fact that my German is schrecklich (terrible). You may be able to grasp the meaning of “Cottbusser Arschlecker”, for example.
It’s the history of Dynamo that is so completely different from that of our own dear team. In the days of the GDR, before the wall came down and the two Germanys reunited, Dynamo won the GDR’s first division title ten years in a row. They played in the European Cup and were regularly at grounds like Anfield. Their success seems to be connected with who their chairman was: one Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi. Referees regularly gave them a soft time.
I’ve wracked my brains to see what Hereford could learn from this. We could recruit to the board the local Police and Crime Commissioner, John Campion. But would that make us C(h)ampions? I doubt it.
Perry Walker